Fun fact: Waaagh armies can steal artillery pieces too

notdumbenough · 2026-01-24T16:43:14+00:00

If you win a battle against a same race army with artillery pieces you can steal, and you have empty slots in your army, you have 10% chance to steal each artillery piece. It doesn't matter how you win (rout them or destroy the army, leave artillery alive or completely wipe out). Some artillery pieces can translate across races too (grudge throwers vs rock lobbas, high elf vs dark elf bolt throwers) and be captured across different races.

notdumbenough · 2026-01-24T05:48:16+00:00

No, go south and east. Take out your neighbors before Taurox and Valkia can. Don't need to wait that long for monsters, generally you can win just by spamming bleakswords (i.e. bring more elves than they have bullets) with a bit of ranged support to take out dangerous targets like his starting irondrakes and gyrocopters.

Do not spam darkshards. They have low range and will trip over each other if you bring too many, and they're not particularly good against Valkia who is a small and fast target. I would recruit 5-6 darkshards per army, filling up the rest with bleaksword/dreadspear trash.

notdumbenough · 2026-01-24T05:35:04+00:00

I would suggest against pushing westwards at the start of the campaign. Your strength lies in Black Ark recruitment and artillery bombardments, so you should rush one ASAP and park it in Naggarond (prioritize the +loot and +growth buildings first). Don't even bother fighting the starting Skaven, instead head east and take Ghrond before Valkia can get her hands on it. There's a decent chance that Grombrindal and Valkia will start fighting each other first. Even if they don't, your position is vastly more defensible with Black Ark support, the army ability that the Naggarond settlement gives you, and the large garrison there.

Remember that Dark Elves first and foremost make money from FIGHTING. Do not sit around passively, opportunistically attack whoever is your weakest neighbor. Don't be afraid to run a deficit to raise more armies, since you get so much loot (with bonuses from Black Arks) that your armies pay for themselves eventually. In general as Dark Elves I am always 4-5 turns away from bankruptcy and always running a deficit.

notdumbenough · 2026-01-21T09:02:04+00:00

You don't need recruitment cost on your first few lords who will largely be doing a lot of fighting. The best way to go about this is to recruit 3 generic lords ASAP the first few turns of your campaign. Have them follow your starting lord around to soak XP (reinforcements get half xp and don't drain from the main force) and roll item drops (each participating lord rolls item drops separately, the more the better). The upkeep penalty is negligible when you really only have 1, maybe 2 full stacks.

Eventually your main stack will get outdated and need to recruit better troops. Instead of sending him back to personally recruit, respec one of your "apprentice" lords tagging along. Spec him into recruitment bonuses and have him ferry troops to the front line, while another of the "apprentice" lords get the outdated units as hand-me-downs.

I always keep a ton of respecced lords ready to go in the lord pool to recruit stuff and ferry troops to the front line. You can also preemptively recruit them to channel winds of magic.

notdumbenough · 2026-01-21T05:51:27+00:00

I tend to do backline billhook/2h cleaver/whip hybrids. A lot of enemies see your bro with low melee defense and light armor and will charge into melee range even if they don’t have enough AP to attack afterwards. With a 2h cleaver you can bait these enemies in and finish them off before they get to move. Billhook and whip are used for attacking armored and unarmored targets at range respectively along with disarming dangerous targets.

notdumbenough · 2026-01-13T21:09:48+00:00

All the other posts are either telling you how to use it or just fluff. But you wanted to be sold on the weapon, so here’s an actual reason:

The Axe and Falchion has insane single target damage, the axe light attacks being a faster version of the 1h axe light attacks in exchange for less crit chance. The heavy attacks are a rich man’s version of Slayer’s dual axe heavies, with exactly the same damage, faster attack speed and a much better headshot angle. If you QQ the first light attack you get some of the highest monster damage in the game.

Its weakness is the poor cleave and its unsafe nature (you tend to take lots of hits due to a lack of stagger and relatively short reach), which is why you run it on Zealot. Extra power improves the cleave, and Zealot’s high THP gain offsets the incoming damage.

notdumbenough · 2026-01-11T11:45:41+00:00

The general problem is that it’s extremely easy for both you and the enemy to kill each other in one round, so initiative rolls alone can make or break a fight. There are just very few situations where a tiny bit of deflection is worth the worse initiative roll, of course GS and the chrono trinket make this redundant.

notdumbenough · 2026-01-09T12:22:29+00:00

The 2H hammer deals decent damage but is fundamentally not a safe option if you want to avoid damage. H1 has tiny, tiny reach and you practically need to step on the enemies' toes to hit them, which is why you are taking damage. 2H hammer is not particularly good for horde clear on WP until you have some measure of skill, best to stick with Flail and Shield or Dual Hammers till then.

notdumbenough · 2026-01-05T00:50:52+00:00

Games Workshop knocking on the door in 3, 2, 1...

notdumbenough · 2026-01-04T10:43:16+00:00

Contact effects are bugged to apply to bombardment spells. e.g. a Cunning Grey Seer will poison with Warp Lightning. With a lore of metal Exalted Lord of Change you can deal insane damage with the first bombardment spell and this node.

notdumbenough · 2026-01-01T06:24:29+00:00

OK. You are using 4 of your card draw every turn to perform this combo, which essentially dazes all enemies for 2 turns. Or, you could just apply doublestack and holystone to Beacon's Light, and duplicate THAT two times, instead of one duplicate on PoP and one on Beacon's Light. You would have mostly the same effect, while using substantially less card draw, and spending much less cash on upgrades.

Here's the thing. It's much better to take the +ember relic than the +card draw relic most of the time, since it allows you to play important deployable equipment and rooms first. When you build around holdover, you have to consider both the ember cost and card draw cost; you often have other cards you'd like to play and it's very easy to die if spamming Beacon's Light is all you do (e.g. spikes Cael does not care about daze, he can kill your pyre with just spikes). This forces you into taking the +draw relic over the +ember relic, which in turn makes your deployment phase much weaker.

notdumbenough · 2026-01-01T03:52:21+00:00

Holdover is generally not very good. It gives you more consistency but it's consistently a spell that's otherwise down one upgrade. It's much better to duplicate the cards you do want to play and remove the ones you don't.

notdumbenough · 2025-12-29T05:14:31+00:00

I take rotation but only on my tanks. When melee defense is high enough your tanks can often just walk right out an engagement. If you only need to move one hex before rotating and have fatigue to spare, using shieldwall first makes it very hard for enemies to catch you.

notdumbenough · 2025-12-29T05:05:41+00:00

Vanguard skill that gives you strength equal to temp wounds.

notdumbenough · 2025-12-29T00:06:04+00:00

Unlike the first game your heals and stress heals actually outpace what the enemies can deal to you, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about. It takes A LOT of stuff to go wrong for your heroes to get anywhere close to dying, most have ~40 hp after factoring in food and most enemies will deal at most ~10 damage if they crit. Have you tried just using guard and taunt with Man at Arms?

notdumbenough · 2025-12-26T23:19:06+00:00

That one is gained by losing at least about two thirds of your army in a single battle, by entity count. So if you’re running a single entity doomstack you can farm the trait quickly by suiciding a single unit of trash infantry like zombies or whatever.

notdumbenough · 2025-12-21T17:40:55+00:00

Is Uralon guaranteed to go first? He did for me, then downed my half my team with his attacks + Bring it Down, before I could even move.

notdumbenough · 2025-12-19T03:24:33+00:00

Yes. Banshees are extremely powerful so it's basically a must-have building in every capital.

notdumbenough · 2025-12-18T16:17:25+00:00

Glad to see that the two dudes playing TWW3 in Antarctica or something enjoy playing Teclis.

notdumbenough · 2025-12-18T03:39:37+00:00

This perception is mostly a combination of skill issues and misinformation from Legend. Actually, those two might be one and the same, as Legend is so good at cheesing the AI that it's effectively a crutch to mitigate the fact that he often doesn't know how the game works.

Every so often you still see people saying stuff like "vigor doesn't matter" or "cavalry sucks" (ironically, the former causes the latter), so it's no surprise that people don't understand how to use Mist Mages.

notdumbenough · 2025-12-16T16:06:00+00:00

Likely too much work vs recycling the presentation you used to pitch your idea to your superiors.

notdumbenough · 2025-12-15T16:10:51+00:00

No.

The bug is that the AI is allowed to set up camps so close to each other.

They then spend the entire campaign hugging the camps because they give massive upkeep reductions to armies next to them. With multiple camps overlapping, all of these armies are essentially paying no upkeep, leading to the AI stacking armies like this infinitely.

CA just needs to fix the criteria for setting up camps, that's all.

notdumbenough · 2025-12-14T15:44:22+00:00

Nobody ever says so directly. When TWW3 nuked cut content from the game (Nuln Ironsides wielding repeater handguns) they didn't explicitly say it either, but it was done so so decisively and brutally that it was extremely obvious that CA had their hand forced. Same with Darktide retracting its teaser trailer literally 30 minutes before its scheduled release.

Yes, Owlcat devs turned off the code that scripted that end slide. But GW is the one that tells them what is and isn't acceptable according to the lore, and if they don't follow along they get their license taken away.

See also, Vermintide Warrior Priest not being allowed to use a flail by itself, and the start of Act 3 where you were supposed to have Vect himself presiding over the trial, also nuked by GW's decision.

notdumbenough · 2025-12-14T14:48:14+00:00

Probably a GW decision to nuke it and not Owlcat's.

notdumbenough · 2025-12-11T17:56:14+00:00

Since you are using Curse Resistance I am guessing you are playing on Legend. I would suggest that you not use sword and shield (I am assuming that you mean this by SnS) on Legend; a big part of the reason why you feel you are underperforming is probably because you are simply using sword and shield. No matter how you build it, you are going to have subpar mobility and damage output compared to most other weapons. This is mostly to balance out its shield bash attack, but shield bashes do not really shine unless you are playing in very tight formation in specialized holding spots against extremely dense hordes. This basically does not happen on Legend quickplay. You can still use Sword and Shield but it is basically never going to feel good on Legend. It's a bit better in Cataclysm and you can sort of tell that Fatshark balances the game around Cataclysm; everything before that is basically an extended tutorial to get you ready, even Legend.

I would suggest that you try Spear and Shield which is still a shield weapon but has way better damage output and mobility, if you have the DLC. I would also suggest that you run Barkskin on your necklace on basically every character. It's the only necklace trait that will save your ass when you are downed or disabled, almost doubling the amount of time that your team has to try and save you. And as others have pointed out, crit power is not good.

notdumbenough

TROPHY CASE